There are many furries in my groups of friends, both on- and off-line. Suffice to say, I know only a little of the furry community, as it’s not something I am a part of; but it reminds me a lot of the Brony community (of which I certainly am part) in some key ways: Sure, at a glance it may seem weird, crazy, and perhaps even from a misguided perspective, just wrong. But it’s nothing of these sorts at all. When you get down to its core, it’s just a group of people with similar interests being themselves and wanting to spread a message of tolerance and welcomeness, not the ones of hatred and fear that so many other groups try to promote in the name of so-called “righteousness.”

Amidst the culture shock of moving their lives to the other side of the world, these refugees have been welcomed with open arms and friendly attitudes. Many of their first post-move memories will be of these characters, just wanting to be playful and funny and pose for photos and whatnot — even memories of hugs being offered. These memories will not be ones of being prejudiced for their beliefs or hated for where they came from.

And that is a message that I believe the world needs to hear so much more of: Why must we hate each other because we’re different? Let’s instead embrace those differences. Work together. Play together. Laugh together. Grow together. Learn together. In doing so, we can learn more about each other, more about our own world, and more about our place as a humanity within the rest of this endless universe.

So to all the conventioneers and those involved in this VancouFur convention, I say thank you. Thank you for being so warmhearted. I’d imagine it’s an understatement to say that it was probably a difficult line to walk for a while; but thank you for showing by example how wonderful it can be to accept cultural differences, understand them, and welcome them. And perhaps a bit ironically, thank you for showing through your fursonas the goodness that can come of humans simply being kind to one another, not because it produces any sort of gain, but just because it’s the right thing to do. Well done!

For those who might not know, I am an avid Ingress player. It is a fun augmented-reality game, which is to say that it overlays the map of the game onto that of the physical world; so in order to interact with items and points of significance in the game, you must be near them in the real world.

To make a long story short, the game has two teams, or factions, called the Resistance (blue) and Enlightened (green), for story reasons. The goal of the game is to capture and hold control points, called “portals,” and link them together to form triangular areas called “control fields”: areas surrounded by your faction’s portal links. Larger and more numerous fields give the faction more total points (in game terminology, “mind units”, or simply “MUs”). These are what determine your faction’s score, if they are still standing, at the end at the end of that cycle checkpoint (each 5-hour period of time when the servers tally the MU scores of each faction) . Players, called “agents”, use a variety of items that they acquire from portals by “hacking” them, to capture portals and upgrade them. Among these items are bursters (weapons used to attack enemy portals), resonators (which empower the portals and align them an agent’s faction), so-called “flip cards” (JARVIS viruses and ADA refactors, which forcibly convert a portal to be aligned to the Enlightenment or Resistance factions, respectively), and enhancements (called “mods”) to the portal itself, such as defensive ones like shields (which reduce some damage from enemy attacks), or utility ones like heat sinks and multi-hacks (which allow agents to hack gear from the portal more often) and link amps (which increase the maximum link range of the portal).

I had a provocation earlier tonight with some would-be allies which inspired this post, in that I had destroyed, captured, and created fields from so-called “pineapples” that they set up. It’s only recently that I’ve come to learn about this tactic (so named because they resemble the fruit in appearance); but in essence, one can capture an enemy portal, deploy all 8 low-level resonators onto it as close to its center as possible, fill its mod slots with otherwise useless things (like regular link amps), then use a flip card to transfer control of it back to the opposition. The goal of such a tactic is straightforward: resource denial. What could have been a reasonably well-defended portal is at any point later easy to destroy (since it has no defensive mods, and the resonators are all packed so close together). Furthermore, since it is low-level, it does not provide much useful gear. In theory, it forces the enemy to use their own flip card (which are rare) and destroy it before recapturing themselves, thereby expending weaponry and their own resources and time. While this may have been a viable tactic when the game first began many years ago, it no longer is. It is said in this game that the best defense is a good offense, and such a flawed tactic demonstrates this by failing to take into account five important aspects of gameplay.

First, portals provide equipment to both factions, and so forcibly keeping a portal at a low level serves only to reduce the total gear available in the game from that portal, thereby reducing item opportunity for nearby agents in both factions. And even when flipped, enemy agents can still upgrade all of the resonators, thereby producing a high-level portal from which any agent can then acquire good equipment. Admittedly, the portal will not be as farm-friendly without these hack mods to acquire items more often from it; but this detriment in farm is in fact a detriment to the farm of both factions.

Second, since the portal has all its resonator slots filled, it can still be used to create links and fields (albeit weakened ones), which add to the key scoring metric used in determining the victor at each 5-hour checkpoint.

Third, items which used to be very rare in game, including flip cards, are now much more commonplace thanks to the existence of MUFG capsules (which gradually duplicate their contents). Because of their steady duplication of items, the introduction of MUFG capsules is arguably the most significant change to the game in its entire history, even moreso than flip cards or ultra strikes. In fact, I have two of these so-called “muffins” full of flip cards, giving me one or two free JARVISes and a handful of free ADAs every day. Forcing an enemy to expend what are now reasonably commonplace items in order to destroy and recapture their portals is inherently counterproductive, as doing so gives the enemy faction AP and badge credits (two other scoring metrics in the game, used to increase agent levels).

Fourth, it fails to account for the existence of ultra strikes (high power weapons with a very small blast radius). Once flipped, pineapples by their design are almost stupidly easy to destroy with a few well-placed ultra strike blasts. And because the resonators are all very low level, this will work even through the mitigation of any shields that might have been installed. Again, all that this accomplishes is a bit of AP and badge credit gain for both sides.

Lastly, the goal of pineapples is usually to deny an enemy gear, and so it is done in small portal clusters that are known to be often enemy-controlled and used for farming (with mods like multi-hacks and heat sinks, which allow equipment to be gained from these portals more often). But one of the strongest defenses a farm has is specifically the fact that it is clustered: any portal whose resonators are attacked is likely to counterattack the offending agent, so by spacing resonators in the farm widely, any enemy agent that attacks them is likely to hit multiple portals and therefore be counterattacked just as widely. On the other hand, pineapples, once flipped, are easy to destroy with weaker low-range weapons (or, a few well-placed ultra strikes as noted above) rather than the more powerful but larger-range ones, thus reducing the total counterattacks done to that enemy agent. It is therefore more detrimental to the enemy agents to fully capture and deploy on their farm, and put on attack mods like turrets and force amps (which make the portals’ counterattacks happen more often and make them more powerful). And again, these can simply be flipped just as easily; and if an enemy did, he or she would not be able to replace these attack mods with hack ones, being just as counterproductive to their farm as pineapples were perhaps intended.

But all this is simply an aside: pineapples are not a viable long-term tactic in Ingress; and the only purpose they serve is to waste the time and resources of both factions, one in creating the pineapple, and the other in destroying it to claim it properly. The true issue that provoked this post was that in capturing and fielding from the pineapples that I mentioned earlier, I had teammates remarking to me in chat a few moments after the fact that they had “made those portals […] fucked up and ada’d [sic] for a reason.” That’s all well and good perhaps, but the entire purpose of the game is to capture, link, and create control fields from portals. This is exactly what I did between these 5 portals in question. And in doing so, I was reprimanded by members of my own faction for simply playing the game as it was intended. These agents even went so far as to accuse me of somehow being a double-agent, playing for the Resistance’s benefit. That crossed the line of being sensible discussion of tactics to one of inflammatory and blatantly false accusations, and it was that at that point that I stopped responding to any of the three agents involved. Tactical disagreements happen, sure; but I will not be unjustly accused of being something I’m not.

Because, after all, it’s just a game; and I’m not going to let myself stop enjoying something that for almost two years has forced me to get more exercise and visit more of my city, all because three ignorant agents from my own faction apparently don’t want me earning points toward our faction’s victory.

And if any of those three are reading this post, please take note of the following: Should you decide to continue making pineapples in those spots which have become part of my daily walking path between classes, I intend to keep upgrading them and making fields from them just as often. Whether or not I capture them first is dependent only on whether or not they are blue at that time. I do this not out of spite or malice; but rather as a way to earn points for myself and the Enlightened faction (which is, again, the entire purpose of the game).

Ask any good psychologist or neuroscientist to explain the contrast between introversion and extroversion, and you’re likely to be told something akin to this: Introverts expend energy in social interaction and recharge by having solitary downtime, while extroverts recharge by being social and lose energy when left alone or with little to do.

But what is this “energy”? Sure, it’s easy enough to intuit. Clearly, extroverts are always so outgoing, very talkative, and need to be with other people. They excel at group situations and meeting new people, and become antsy and frustrated when left alone for any length of time. Introverts, on the other hand, function much better in one-on-one situations or with small groups of people they know, and tend to dislike smalltalk when it’s just to “network” with new people. In addition, introverts love having solitude for periods of time to recharge their internal batteries.

This analogy of charging/expending energy, while a bit oversimplified, is an accurate one. So then, why are large social situations so “costly” to an introvert? And why can they still “recharge” even when in large groups of close friends/family?

Let’s take a step back from this for a moment and look at how we interact in this society. We all wear our proverbial masks every time we step into the real world: hiding the reality of who we are and letting everyone see only the selves we wish to show.

As an introvert myself, I’ve come to theory that this “energy” cost in social situations is merely the necessity to ourselves of maintaining these masks. As we wear the masks and keep our internal filters and censors active, we expend more and more of our mental energy.

At least for me, this is why I “recharge” by spending lots of times with my close friends: Even though I’m being very social and involving myself with other people, it is with friends to whom I’d trust unfalteringly. I don’t have to keep any of my internal filters going or some such. I can just be me. I don’t have to hide who or what I am.

My theory isn’t very good at explaining the other side of this analogy, though. If this is the case, then why do extroverts lose energy by being alone and recharge by being so social and active? This is already beyond my understanding, and something I’d be mildly interested in researching further…But that’s a topic for another day!

Those who have compiz (“Desktop Effects”) enabled on 965 GPUs should be very wary of today’s xorg-x11-server-1.6.3-4.fc11 (FEDORA-2009-8766) update. For some reason or another, it makes Compiz prone to crashing when starting up. The solution to this is to revert to 1.4.3-3, or to temporarily disable Compiz. The latter can be done by changing the GConf entry. Switch to a virtual terminal from the GDM login screen by pressing Ctrl + Alt + F2, then login and run the following command:

Again, this does not actually fix the problem in the Xorg/Compiz stack. It instead disables Compiz entirely (reverting to Metacity – the default GNOME window manager).

This will workaround the bug until it can be solved properly. Note that any attempt to re-enable Compiz once logged in will also recreate this crash. So, it’s best to just leave it off until this is fixed.